Bitcoin mining difficulty adjustment mechanism

Bitcoin mining difficulty reflects the difficulty of calculating the hash of a new block. This difficulty is adjusted +/- every 2 weeks (more precisely 2,016 blocks) and serves to keep the average time of production of new blocks +/- 10 minutes. Difficulty increases and decreases according to the network’s processing power, or is directly proportional to the network’s processing power. If there is an increase in processing power, the difficulty will increase, and if it decreases, the difficulty will decrease. In this way, the bitcoin core algorithm maintains the incentives necessary for miners so that there is a balance between spending and earnings, since the more difficult it is to produce a block, the more energy will be needed.

In a nutshell, increasing difficulty means that miners will have to solve a more difficult mathematical puzzle. This mathematical puzzle (hash calculation) will have to have more or fewer zeros on the left according to the difficulty.